After years of instability and freefall, Birmingham & Solihull can this weekend make a massive stride towards arresting their chilling descent down English rugby’s pyramid.

Exactly two years to the day since they beat Rotherham at Damson Park and there was still hope in their Championship hearts, Bees travel to Westoe for a match that throws National Two North’s 13th and 14th-ranked sides into direct confrontation.

The clubs stand either side of the relegation line and if Bees manage to extract their seventh win of the season from what is sure to be a nervy afternoon, they could be 17 points clear of danger.

With
a third of the campaign still remaining, victory would confer no guarantees but it would afford the Portway outfit the sort of comfortable buffer they have not been able to enjoy in either of their past two seasons – both of which have ended in relegation.

“The boys are talking about that themselves,” head coach Eugene Martin admitted.

“We have had a big week in training and when the snow was down we used that time to do a lot of conditioning work.”

A
further indication of how seriously Bees are taking the game is the fact they are travelling up and staying overnight, a rare luxury in the straitened fourth-tier.

They
do so on the back of a morale-boosting 19-0 win over Sheffield Tigers last time out, which, admittedly was three weeks ago, and they also do so with leading scorer Oscar Heath after a wrist injury kept him out for
two-months.

The former Rugby Lion had been Martin’s find of the season, with ten tries including match-winning displays against Hull and Huddersfield.

“He is pretty quick and elusive and attracts a lot of attention because he is so potent from full back.”

The
19-year-old is just one of a host of teenagers in Bees’ line-up, others
include second-row Matt Spink, tighthead Jonah Boyce, all of whom have become important cogs in Martin’s machine. They are helped out by gnarled veterans like Matt Long and Rob Connolly.

And
success tomorrow would ensure B&S can begin thinking about retaining some of their young prospects and not only end the downward cycle but the constant state of flux the squad has been in for the last two years.